We salute The Tragically Hip

If there’s a band more quintessentially Canadian than Kingston’s the Tragically Hip, we’d like to know about them. For the better part of three decades (!), the quintet of vocalist Gordon Downie, guitarists Paul Langlois and Rob Baker, bassist Gord Sinclair and drummer Johnny Fay have waved the nation’s rock and roll flag, producing album after album of angular, offbeat, consistently excellent songs at once shaped by their homeland yet universal in theme.

Granted, they’d be a lot less interesting were it not for oddball singer Downie and his bottomless supply of oh-so-watchable tics, twitches and nutty non-sequiturs reliably dispatched from the stage. Still, the Hip is the sum of its parts, and a national treasure besides. As the band prepares a coast-to-coast tour in support of their Now for Plan A disc, we salute them, stubbies in hand and toques jauntily pushed to the side.